Gogoro presents electric scooter sharing platform
The Taiwanese electric scooter manufacturer Gogoro has created its own sharing platform, GoShare, for renting electric scooters with exchangeable batteries. GoShare will initially start in the Northwestern Taiwanese district of Taoyuan with around 1,000 electric scooters in August.
With GoShare, Gogoro intends to expand its sales network to include its own sharing network in addition to classic sales models. The company has built up a dominant position in Taiwan over the years and, according to its own figures, serves 97 per cent of the local market for electric scooters. If the combustion engines are added, Gogoro still has a market share of 17 per cent.
In addition to scooters, the core of the product range is the well-developed network of battery exchange stations. The range of the scooters is only 80 kilometres. Thanks to the 1,200 exchange stations spread all over Taiwan, the practical range increases enormously. The first major test for the GoShare programme is now to take place in Taoyuan in the north of the country.
Battery swapping makes sense at a time when battery technology is developing at a fast rate, yet electric vehicles themselves can be long-lasting and robust. In July last year, a Honda and Panasonic announced a project in Indonesia to trial battery swapping for electric motorcycles.
As a company representative said in an interview, GoShare will be available in several cities around the world by the end of 2020. It is not yet known which cities and countries these will be.
The Gogoro scooters are already part of everyday street life in some European cities. In Berlin, Paris and Madrid the electric scooters are being used by the Bosch subsidiary Coup. Here, Gogoro merely delivered the scooters, while Coup takes care of operating the fleet.
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